(This blog essay is overdue because I'm still waiting for new prescription glasses and writing while cross-eyed with text zoomed to 250% is tedious. They should be here later this week. Meanwhile ...)

Back in January 2022 I wrote an essay revisiting my predictions for 2017. My review of 2017's stab in the dark began, "it spanned three blog posts and ended happily in a nuclear barbecue to put us all out of our misery: start here, continue with this, and finale: and the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth."

I'll actually stand by those 2017 predictions, which were weirdly not that far off the mark although Queen Elizabeth II outlasted my prediction by several years.

But my 2022 predictions?

Oh boy.

Look, for an amateur futurologist writing in January of 2022 it was arguably forgivable to miss the US electorate being so boneheadedly stupid that they'd re-elect the most corrupt president in their nation's history, at the head of a Gish gallop of barkingly ignorant and destructive cranks and conspiracy theorists determined to tear down the republic and destroy its vital institutions, all in the name of returning the social order (per the Project 2025 plan) to the 50s--the 1850s, that is, not the 1950s. With 20/20 hindsight, what I missed was the now-obvious wave of media ownership consolidation, including corporate social media such as X, Meta, and Google, in the hands of a narrow class of billionaire oligarchs. I also missed the complacent incompetence of the Biden administration with respect to organizing their succession plans--it was obvious that by 2024 he'd be vulnerable to campaign ratfucking on grounds of his age, and his anointed successor was guilty of being (a) too female and (b) non-white, rendering her unacceptable to a large chunk of the voters.

But, even if you forgive my failure to recognize the catastrophic collapse of the US as a credible hegemonic superpower over the past 3-4 years, I can only hang my head in shame over my failure to anticipate the Ukraine war, which broke out six weeks after that blog essay. Let alone to anticipate a revolution in military affairs as profound as that brought about of the first world war.

Similiarly, I have no excuse for not recognizing that an Israel with politics dominated by Benjamin Netanyahu would go Full Nazi sooner rather than later, as the genocide in Gaza and the program to build a Greater Israel in Lebanon demonstrate. I mean, I grew up going to synagogue and have visited Israel more than once! I should have seen the signs, they were all there as far back as the 1980s. Mea culpa. (And fuck those guys.)

While I correctly recognized the EV transport revolution, I missed the concurrent solar power and grid-scale battery revolution, now very visibly in train and arguably more important than the arrival of cheap electric cars and cheaper e-bikes. I didn't notice the global supply chain crisis of 2021-2023, even then gathering pace, although it didn't impact consumer prices for a few more months.

Possibly my worst miss is that I completely discounted the profound social impact of LLMs (or so-called "AI"), not simply as a massive technology sector investment bubble and happy hunting ground for snake oil salesmen and grifters, but as a corrosive influence on population-level critical thinking. I should have seen it coming--I read Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason back in the 1980s--but I didn't recognize just how unable to see past the ELIZA illusion most people would prove to be.

Nor did I expect the transhumanists, extropians, and the rest of the hairball of beliefs now congealing into the syncretistic techno-religion of TESCREAL to have seized control of trillions of dollars of private equity and not only be arguing about the Singularity but to be squabbling over who gets to run it (with a side-order of racism and eugenics on top, because every flavour of crank batshittery is so much better with a side-order of fascism and concentration camps).

So I'm sticking a flag in the ground here and admitting: I am officially a shit futurologist.

Back in 2022, and before that, in 2017 and even in 2007, I espoused a general rule of thumb about predicting the future, that:

Looking 10 years ahead, about 70% of the people, buildings, cars, and culture is already here today. Another 20-25% is not present yet but is predictable -- buildings under construction, software and hardware and drugs in development, children today who will be adults in a decade. And finally, there's about a 5-10% element that comes from the "who ordered that" dimension

2022 forced me to update the ratio to:

20% of 10-year-hence developments utterly unpredictable, leaving us with 55-60% in the "here today" and 20-25% in the "not here yet, but clearly on the horizon" baskets

Anyway, it's now 2026, and I officially give up.

The Stross Ratio for predicting events ten years hence is now 60/10/30. That is: 60% of the people, buildings, and culture are here today. 10% is predictably on the drawing boards, and a whopping 30% is utterly unpredictable.

Airborne Hantavirus pandemic or global Measles pandemic, who the fuck knows what we're going to get--given that the US FDA is run by a crank who doesn't believe in the germ theory of disease and seems to be trying to spike vaccine development globally?

A shutdown of global semiconductor fabrication caused by a worldwide helium shortage, and a global fertilizer shortage causing famine and food price spikes, due to a senile sundowning autocrat starting a war with Iran without any clear exit strategy?

Who ordered any of this?

I'm reasonably confident that the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be over by this time in 2030--quite likely by this time in 2027, due to the collapse of the Russian domestic economy. I'm also reasonably confident that the US war on Iran will be over by this time in 2030, if only because Trump will most likely be dead or in palliative care (possibly following his removal in a soft coup via Article 25 of the US constitution, due to his very obvious current illness and decline). (Note that Trump's insistence on "running for a third term" is very probably a serious sign that the electoral process in the USA is no longer fully functional, under the aegis of the supreme court he appointed, as long as he survives. His successor may not be able to sustain his ability to ignore the law: if they can, then, well, the US Republic is over: it had a good run, from 1776 to 2026.) The AI bubble will have burst long before May 2027--the semiconductor pinch caused by the aforementioned helium supply crisis will cripple Nvidia's ability to manufacture chipsets for data centers, and the US DCs are all being built to run on diesel/kerosene burning gas turbine power plants anyway, the price of which has skyrocketed due to the gulf war.

I expect us to be well into Great Depression 2.0 by this time in 2030.

There will be some grounds for hope. The global energy transition to renewables will, by that point, be a done deal. It also means China will have replaced the USA as the global energy superpower--not because they dominate the transport routes for energy but because they manufacture 80% of the planet's EVs and PV panels and batteries. But that's a tenuous hold on superpowerdom. If the Chinese government throws its weight around in the 21st century the way the USA did in the 20th, it will rapidly find first-tier rivals building up their own manufacturing capability: meanwhile, PV/battery is inherently easier to distribute that large, centralized grid based power supplies, and the dronification of warfare means (at least in the near term) that rapid mechanized wars of maneuver are a non-starter: the "fog of war" is on the way out, replaced by highly precise targeting of advancing assets and the robotization of the front line.

In space, I'm pretty sure we will see a Kessler Syndrome event if the idiotic rush towards putting data centers in orbit goes anywhere. But I think it's not going to happen--SpaceX is inextricably tied to the current tech bubble, and when it pops Elon Musk is going to wish he had a bunker to hide in.

The main casualty of this decade is the ideological credibility of capitalism as a social organizational principle.

Enshittification, also known as platform decay, per wiki, is "a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders." Systematic capture of the US government and the global system of trade by capitalists has resulted in the creation of a framework optimized for enshittification all round, and the result is the enshittification of everything--all the infrastructure of the capitalist world is decaying and on fire as the post-privatization owners loot it.

This is the Marx-predicted crisis of capitalism, and it's been in progress since the collapse of the USSR in 1991 removed the main ideological standard-bearer for opposition. It accelerated in 2008 with the global financial crisis, and again in 2020 when the pandemic provided top cover for the hyaenas to go on a looting spree. They've stripped the corpse of actually-existing social democracies everywhere to the bone, and now they're cannibalizing their own body politic. Disaster capitalism has finally come home to roost, and it won't end until the global financial system collapses. Meanwhile, the generation born in the 21st century has no time for their shit. We are moving into a political state weirdly reminiscent of the period between 1905 and the 1930s. If we're lucky we're going to get New Deal 2.0 and a brisk round of socialism: if we're unlucky, it's going to be guillotine time all over again.

PS: do not expect to see me visiting the USA any time soon. Millions of people applying for a US visa are now required to make all of their social media accounts publicly visible -- or risk having their applications delayed or denied outright. The directive, which covers more than a dozen nonimmigrant visa categories, has been rolling out in phases since June 2025 and expanded significantly as of 30 March 2026. This policy is impossible to implement without feeding all those social media profiles to an LLM in search of a verdict, and they'll obviously be screening applicants for ideological compatibility. And if it's rolling out to visa applicants now, the automated program will inevitably be applied to I-94W (visa waiver) travelers shortly thereafter. My social media profile is that of a pro-LGBT pro-Green hard left troublemaker, so ... nope, not going there: I am absolutely not interested in touring the concentration camps of El Salvador!

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the stories this week that spread life across space, went stir crazy for science, held the colony together, and peacefully sat it out.

First, what if we went all the way to Europa only to find that some earthly bacteria already set up shop there? Then: red rum on the Red Planet, the palace intrigue of tropical wasps, and an afterlife in full lotus.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files. 

That’s one small step for a dust-borne bacterium…

Osmanov, Zaza. “Earth as a potential source of life for Europa’s subsurface ocean.” International Journal of Astrobiology.

Europa, the ice moon of Jupiter, is considered one of the most promising candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life due to its vast subsurface ocean. But imagine what a trip it would be to not just find aliens on this world, but to learn that they originally hailed from Earth.

That’s the premise of a new study that investigates “the possibility of dust particles containing living bacteria ejected from Earth reaching Europa and landing on its surface,” according to author Zaza Osmanov of the Free University of Tbilisi. 

“Life on Earth originated at least 3.55 billion years ago, which implies that for approximately that long, Earth has been shedding life-bearing particles into surrounding space,” Osmanov said in the study. “Hence, if favorable conditions exist elsewhere in the Solar System and can be accessed by dust particles, the transport of life from Earth appears plausible and may have been occurring over the course of several billion years.”

This idea that life might travel between planets, or even star systems, is called panspermia. In addition to Earth life potentially expanding beyond our planet, scientists have previously speculated that life on Earth was itself seeded by microbes from another world, such as Mars. 

To game out a scenario in which earthly bacteria might reach Europa, Osmanov estimated the rate at which dust-borne bacteria is dislodged from Earth by impacts and how it might then endure a long journey through space and survive a crash into the icescape of Europa.  

He concluded that many trillions of life-bearing dust grains from Earth could have reached the moon’s surface over tens of millions of years. From there, surviving microbes may have spent generations shimmying down through cracks in its ice shell, which is dozens of miles thick, into the dark waters of the ocean below. 

Though the deck would be stacked against these microbes, the high number of dust particles that Earth sloughs off into space “renders the existence of life on Europa highly plausible,” according to the study.

It’s worth noting that panspermia remains a topic of heated academic debate, in part because there are so many uncertainties about the process. For example, H. Jay Melosh, the late geophysicist and panspermia expert, also assessed the odds that Earth life could relocate to Europa and came to the opposite conclusion as Osmanov.

“If life should be found in the oceans of Europa or Enceladus, it is very likely that it’s indigenous rather than seeded from Earth, Mars or (especially) another solar system," Melosh said while presenting findings at the 2019 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, according to Space.com.

Ultimately, we won’t know until we go! NASA’s Europa Clipper is currently on its way to Jupiter to take a closer look at its namesake moon from orbit, and to scout out potential sites for surface exploration in the future. Perhaps decades from now we’ll finally be able to answer the tantalizing question of whether the seas of Europa are inhabited—and if so, if the aliens are homegrown or descended from spacefaring Earthlings. 

In other news…

The Overlook Hotel, but it’s in space

Cantisani, Andrea, Schmutz, Jan B., et al. “Social interactions in isolated, confined, and extreme environments: A study of Antarctic winter teams using wearable sensors.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It’s one thing for a bacterium to make an interplanetary voyage; sending humans across deep space is orders of magnitude harder—and not just because we are flimsy mortal fleshbags. There is also the psychological toll of spending months or years in a confined space on a long-duration mission, such a trip to Mars. 

To anticipate these challenges, scientists enlisted 12 crew members on a 10-month overwintering mission at Antarctica’s Concordia Station to self-report feelings of loneliness and paranoia, while wearing proximity sensors that allowed the team to monitor their movements. 

The results revealed “a progressive deterioration in both individual psychological outcome and team dynamics” in which “loneliness and paranoid thoughts increased over time,” according to researchers co-led by Andrea Cantisani of the University of Bern and Jan Schmutz of the University of Zurich.

The team even singled out one participant who “reported unusually high scores…corresponding to severe levels of paranoid ideation.” Reading the study, it’s hard not to be reminded of John Carpenter's The Thing, or the descent into space madness depicted in movies like Event Horizon or Sunshine.

Indeed, the authors shouted out Stephen King’s The Shining as a fictional precursor to the study’s finding that “prolonged isolation [and] constant proximity does not necessarily strengthen relationships but can instead amplify tension, mistrust, and psychological strain.”

In other words, if astronauts start seeing ghostly masked revelers, murdered children, and mercurial bartenders popping up in their Mars base, it’s time to pack it in and head back to Earth. 

Stirring up a wasp’s nest—for science

Corbett, Owen R. et al. “Compensation of labour by noncompetitive individuals mitigates costs of aggressive succession contest in a social wasp.” Animal Behaviour.

Speaking of hostile social dynamics, it’s time to return to the “dynastic violence" beat. Long-time readers of this newsletter will know that I am a sucker for succession battles in eusocial animals such as naked mole rats or matricidal ants—which are ruled over by one breeding female queen.  

This week, scientists updated the genre by watching what happens when you remove queens of the tropical wasp species Polistes canadensis, a shift that increased colony-level aggression “approximately tenfold,” according to a new study. 

In the ensuing power vacuum, rival females vied for the crown through aggressive behaviors including bites, tackles, stings, and air fights. But even as some females took up arms (and stingers), the team was surprised to observe other wasps stepping into foraging or worker roles they had never occupied before to prevent the colony from collapsing in the chaotic interregnum. 

“Contrary to our predictions, these findings support the theory that some form of compensatory mechanism exists in this species, buffering the conflict of queen succession,” said researchers led by Owen R. Corbett of University College London. “This system, in which some individuals compete while others compensate, could be what allows species like P. canadensis to maintain colony function despite aggressive contest-based succession.”

To channel Cersei Lannister: When you play the game of thrones, you win or you…compensate. While that doesn’t have quite the same ring as the original quote, the wasp colonies definitely weathered their dynastic struggles better than Westeros in the end.

Live by the lotus, die by the lotus

Sun, Chenshuang et al. Multidisciplinary analysis reveals the genetic and dietary structure of the seated burials from Tang Dynasty Chang’an.” Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports.

Last, it’s time to take a seat—for eternity. That’s the idea behind a rare funerary custom called “seated burial,” in which bodies are arranged in an upright sitting posture, in contrast to the far more common practice of being “laid to rest” in a supine pose. 

In a new study, archaeologists examined four individuals who lived between the 7th and 9th centuries in what was then called the Chang’an region of northwest China and were buried in seated poses. The study offers “the first direct genetic evidence” to counter predictions that these burials imply a monastic lifestyle or a particular ethnic lineage, according to researchers led by Chenshuang Sun of Fudan University in Shanghai. 

“Our genomic data contradicts the hypothesis that seated burials have a unique origin from ancestors in northern or northeastern Asia” as “we find no evidence of significant differences between seated burial individuals and their contemporaries,” the team concluded. “Although Buddhist symbolic artifacts, such as pagoda-shaped jars, were found in one tomb, isotopic evidence contradicts strict adherence to vegetarian Buddhist precepts.”

In addition to refuting the special status of the skeletal sitters, the study also includes interesting asides, such as records of Buddhist monks who ended up in “seated death” after “passing away in the full-lotus position.” 

Seated burials have been unearthed across the globe, serving as a reminder to us all that we don’t have to take death lying down. 

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

On an 880-square-foot site in Toshima City—roughly the size of a generous one-bedroom apartment—Key Operation Inc. / Architects has produced a building that contains shops, clinics, cafés, maisonette residences, a curved atrium, a bouldering wall, a slide, and a hammock net suspended within a loft void. Located adjacent to the renewed Naka-Ikebukuro Park and just a two-minute walk from Ikebukuro Station’s East Exit, Clerestory Garden reaches a total floor area of approximately 5,000 square feet. That ratio, nearly six to one, is not unusual for central Tokyo, but what Clerestory Garden proposes is density that does not read as compression.

The project was conceived in relation to both Naka-Ikebukuro Park and Hareza Ikebukuro, the mixed-use cultural and commercial facility that opened in 2019. Once a sandy open space, the park has been renewed as a stone-paved plaza, a civic room of sorts that evokes the character of a European square and now supports cultural events and everyday public activity. Creating a sense of continuity with that plaza became a central theme of the building’s facade design.

Floor-to-ceiling heights of approximately 13 feet—generous by any urban mixed-use standard—establish an interior register of expansiveness that the tight plan area would otherwise foreclose. The decision was enabled in part by the site’s relatively relaxed height restrictions, but the move to exploit that allowance fully, rather than simply meet code minimums, reflects the studio’s deliberate spatial philosophy. Here, height is not treated as leftover zoning capacity, but as a tool for producing breath, light, and spatial complexity within a compact urban envelope.

The residential levels on the seventh and eighth floors carry this logic forward, with the maisonette units organized across two floors. The introduction of lofts transforms each into a quartet: a four-level domestic environment compressed into a two-story envelope. Circulation becomes part of the living experience. A slide connects levels, staircases double as spatial events, and movement through the apartment is choreographed rather than merely accommodated.

The eighth floor pushes the idea furthest, with a curved atrium opening the living-dining space vertically and a net suspended within it to create a hammock-like platform, accessible from above via the bouldering wall. Private rooms and wet areas are arranged on the seventh floor, allowing the domestic program to unfold as a three-dimensional sequence rather than a conventional stacked plan. Below the residences, the building’s commercial section applies the same cross-sectional intelligence. The first- and second-floor tenant spaces can operate independently, but they are also designed to be joined through internal stairs and a dumbwaiter, while the third through sixth floors are envisioned for shops, clinics, and similar uses.

The transom gardens—three-dimensional planting installed within the approximately seven-foot-high windows and the transom sections above them—create interstitial green volumes between the interior tenant spaces and the street. Wall greening was considered, but the architects instead chose this recessed planting strategy to maintain visibility into the tenant spaces while giving the façade a softer, more verdant presence in relation to the plaza. The result is greenery that is not merely applied to the exterior, but layered into the building section itself. Set back into recesses above a lower portion that extends to the site boundary, the transom gardens allow the building to maximize leasable floor area while introducing porous, planted depth along the facade.

That layered strategy continues in the building’s structure. Rather than matching the structural frame to the polygonal exterior shape of the site, the architects adopted a simpler central grid for cost and construction efficiency. The exterior could still respond to the irregular site geometry, while the internal frame remained rational.

Behind the transom gardens, windows aligned with this grid form what the architects call the “Luce Jardin,” or Light Transom Garden, where daylight filters softly through the planting and into the interior. Timber used on the underside of the transom garden eaves creates a second façade of sorts—one experienced from eye level when looking upward—lending warmth to a building otherwise defined by density, precision, and urban constraint.

Clerestory Garden ultimately proposes a more porous model for the mid-rise city building. It maximizes floor area ratio while carving out interstitial spaces for planting, light, and movement. In doing so, it harmonizes with the adjacent plaza and surrounding urban fabric while producing an architecture of density that feels unexpectedly expansive.

To view this and other projects by the studio, visit keyoperation.com.

Photography by ToLoLo studio Mayu Nakamura.

A “river of blood” was how one survivor described the scene in western Myanmar. “I saw shooting. I saw mass killing.” Another told the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHRC) how 20 relatives, including three children, had been killed in the 2024 attack on Htan Shauk Khan village.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said earlier this month that the Arakan Army (AA) “may have killed at least 170 Rohingya men, women, and children” in Hoyyar Siri (known as Htan Shauk Khan in Burmese) in Buthidaung Township. It described the May 2, 2024, attack as a “massacre”.

Buthidaung is one of the two townships in Rakhine State that is home to the majority of the Rohingya, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority in the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar.

At least 40 villages in Buthindaung were burned down in April and May 2024 amid clashes between the AA, an ethnic armed group fighting Myanmar’s military junta for control of Rakhine, and junta forces battling to retain their hold of the township.

Both sides committed abuses against civilians during the clashes, according to HRW. The military junta’s forced conscription of Rohingya to fight on its behalf has also intensified violence against them. 

The military and Rohingya armed groups began arson attacks in Buthidaung township in April 2024. By mid-May the AA had captured all junta bases, according to the think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The destruction of Buthidaung has previously been documented by Bellingcat. 

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The AA has denied accusations that it massacred civilians in Buthidaung, claiming that those killed were junta soldiers and Rohingya militants.

Bellingcat emailed the United League of Arakan, AA’s political wing, about the alleged attack on civilians but did not receive a response at the time of publication. Myanmar’s Ministry of Defence also did not respond to our questions. 

Evidence of civilian harm in Myanmar is slow to emerge and difficult to obtain due to the military’s strict control of the region and the tight grip of armed groups such as the AA in areas they control. 

“The mass killing could only be confirmed more than a year later,” the recent HRW report said, “when survivors eventually crossed into Bangladesh and found their way to the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar.” 

Aerial imagery shows that Htan Shauk Khan was almost entirely destroyed in May 2024.

Erasing Homes

A new investigation by Bellingcat has identified 115 villages in Rakhine State, similar to Htan Shauk Khan, as partially or completely destroyed since the February 2021 military coup that overthrew Myanmar’s democratically elected government.

The data points to a pattern of violence that leaves civilian areas uninhabitable and in some cases, erases them completely.

While it is difficult to ascertain whether the villages we found damaged or destroyed showed signs of reconstruction, at least five of them appear to show some buildings rebuilt in latest available satellite imagery.

Military Control Is Slipping

Last month, in the first election since Myanmar’s 2021 coup, the pro-military parliament chose junta chief Min Aung Hlaing to be the next president.  

According to research group Data for Myanmar, at least 65 townships were excluded from voting, including the 14 in the AA’s control. In Rakhine’s 17 townships, voting was held in only three still under junta control – Kyaukpyu, Sittwe and Manaung.

The AA resumed attacks against the junta in Rakhine in November 2023, ending a year-long ceasefire.

Data published by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) and analysed by Bellingcat reveals a sharp increase in the military’s air and drone strikes in Rakhine. After the AA resumed its offensive, strikes rose from 30 in 2023 to 461 in 2024. By the end of 2024, the AA had captured all but three townships in the state.

Bellingcat found that strikes were then concentrated in the townships where the junta is fighting to maintain control. They decreased in 13 townships captured by the AA and remained unchanged in one during 2025. By contrast, attacks increased in Kyaukpyu and Sittwe, yet to be captured by the AA. Data for Manaung is unavailable.

ACLED’s data comes from multiple sources, including news reports and social media. While the data is not exhaustive, a broad trend can be identified. You can read further details and caveats about the data here.

Su Mon Thant, Asia-Pacific analyst at ACLED,explained that the military conducts clearance operations to prevent the AA from using villages as buffers or shelters – a tactic employed across the country. “At the same time, it’s a warning sign for other villages,” she said, adding that when one village is set ablaze, it sends a signal to other villages not to “accept, shelter or harbor” armed groups. Thant also noted that people are displaced when their village is destroyed, eroding support for armed groups as locals suffer the consequences of the fighting. 

The AA has vowed to take control of all of Rakhine by 2027 and success may bring a geopolitical shift in the region. The armed group’s control over Kyaukpyu and Sittwe will give it significant leverage, with both India and China having infrastructure projects in the townships, Steve Ross of the Stimson Center told Bellingcat.

But neither side can control the state without further alleviation of civilian suffering, Ross said. According to UNHRC data, there are almost half a million internally displaced people (IDPs) in Rakhine as of March 30, 2026.

In Sittwe township alone, about 120,000 Rohingya have been displaced by communal conflict since 2012. 

“People displaced from other parts of Rakhine State during the war are in Sittwe, hundreds of thousands of civilians,” said Thant, adding that neither side can control the capital without significant loss of life.

There are also 1 million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. The futures of both the refugees and IDPs remain uncertain. 

“Nobody can go home yet at this stage,” said Thant.

Bellingcat is a non-profit and the ability to carry out our work is dependent on the kind support of individual donors. If you would like to support our work, you can do so here. You can also subscribe to our Newsletter and follow us on Bluesky here, Instagram here, Reddit here and YouTube here.

The post The ‘Lost’ Villages of Myanmar’s Rakhine appeared first on bellingcat.

This investigation is a collaboration between Bellingcat and Jeune Afrique. You can read Jeune Afrique’s article in French here.

Unexploded Russian-made cluster munition bomblets, as well as damage consistent with bomblet impacts, have been found in a village in northern Mali – despite the West African country being a state party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) which prohibits their use. 

The deployment of cluster munitions in northern Mali was first reported by Radio France International last week, citing local sources yet without showing images of the munitions or strikes in the reporting. However, social media footage posted on May 17, and since analysed by Bellingcat and our publishing partner, Jeune Afrique, shows unexploded Russian manufactured ShOAB-0.5 submunitions (bomblets).

Bellingcat geolocated a video showing the unexploded ShOAB-0.5 bomblets in the village of Tadjmart (18.977305, 0.86072), located approximately 55-kilometers (34-miles) south of the larger town of Aguelhok in northern Mali. This matches the location of airstrikes announced by the Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) on May 17. FAMa claimed it had identified armed groups in the area.

Russia’s paramilitary Africa Corps group, which is controlled by the Russian government and which replaced the Wagner mercenary group in the country, has been supporting Malian military operations.

Mali’s civil war has been ongoing since 2012. But the conflict has spiked in recent weeks as Tuareg separatists from the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) and militants from the al-Qaeda affiliated Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) seized control of parts of the country in coordinated attacks against Malian and Africa Corps forces.

Les mercenaires continuent de larguer des bombes sur des maisons et certains diront pourquoi se révolter contre ces genres des pratiques inhumaines ne respectant aucun Droit. https://t.co/5jynKwUgeW pic.twitter.com/nB3ym4yooc

— Mohamed Lilly (@MedLilly1) May 17, 2026

The footage geolocated by Bellingcat shows the unexploded submunitions near buildings, alongside multiple small craters, consistent with submunition explosions.

The buildings and landmarks visible in the footage allowed us to geolocate where it was taken.

Additional footage geolocated by Bellingcat to nearby coordinates 18.97954, 0.85989 shows destroyed and burning buildings several hundred meters away, although this damage is not consistent with cluster munition use. The damage appears more significant than that which would be caused by submunition impacts.

Cluster munitions are explosive weapons which open mid-air to release large numbers of submunitions. They are prohibited from being used by signatories of the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) because they are indiscriminate, saturate a wide area and can leave behind highly volatile unexploded bomblets which can kill civilians long after deployment. 

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While Mali is a signatory to the CCM, Russia is not a state party to the agreement. 

Brian Finucane, a senior adviser with the US Program at the International Crisis Group, told Bellingcat that as a party to the CCM, Mali is “subject to its prohibitions and requirements. These include not only prohibitions on the use of cluster munitions, but also obligations to clear and destroy such munitions on its territory.”

ShOAB-0.5 submunitions are carried by the Russian RBK-500 cluster munition dispenser. A single RBK-500 dispenser can deploy about 565 ShOAB-0.5 submunitions. There is as yet no footage posted online showing a spent dispenser linked to this incident.Footage did circulate online on May 16 showing the remnants of an RBK-500. It was claimed to have been used in a separate cluster munition strike in the Timbuktu region of Mali. However, this footage was not geolocatable, given it only shows a close up of the dispenser at night, nor was it possible to tell when the footage was taken.

A second video appears to show the same dispenser, but shows the side with visible Russian markings denoting the model: “РБК-500; ШОАБ-0.5; ТГ-30”. This identifies the dispenser, RBK-500, the submunition inside, ShOAB-0.5, and the explosive filler, TG-30.

RBK-500 dispensers are deployed by Russian-made aircraft including several MiG and Su models. According to the 2024 IISS Military Balance report, Mali does not have any known operational Russian fixed-wing attack aircraft. Two Russian Su-25 aircraft delivered to Mali – one in 2022 and another in 2023 – are reported to have crashed and been out of service since late 2023.

An Su-24M model has since appeared in satellite imagery captured at Modibo Keita International Airport in Bamako. The imagery was first published by France 24 in April 2025, although it was unclear if this aircraft was, or has been, operated by Africa Corps or Malian forces.

Bellingcat contacted the Malian military and Russian Ministry of Defence requesting comment, and asking which force was responsible for deploying cluster munitions. We did not receive a substantive response by publication time beyond the initial statement made by the MAFa which detailed it was responsible for the May 17 strike.

A video posted on May 17, by an account linked to Azawad rebels in Northern Mali, shows a person handling components of a ShOAB-0.5 submunition, seemingly unaware of the danger. However, as the video shows only a close up of the submunition, it has not been possible to geolocate the video or confirm when it was taken.

Les Azawadiens ne fabriquent pas les armes au contraire ils les démontent ! pic.twitter.com/0tqOb6ut9G

— Oumayya AG Ambeiry (@AgOumayya) May 17, 2026

The FLA condemned the use of cluster munitions in a statement published on May 18. 

Bellingcat has previously reported on the use of cluster munitions in Syria and Ukraine and the danger they pose to civilians.

Youri van der Weide contributed to this report.

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The Sun is experiencing “striking” long-term shifts in its behavior that have gone undiscovered for more than a decade, according to a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Wednesday. 

The Sun passes through a cycle of high and low activity that lasts roughly 11 years and is caused by variations in the star’s magnetic activity. This activity peaks at a solar maximum, producing more frequent sunspots and higher radio flux, which are known as surface “proxies” of intense magnetism, as well as dramatic eruptions like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. At solar minimum, when magnetic activity winds down, the Sun enters a quieter phase. Throughout the cycle, sound waves known as p-modes oscillate near the surface of the Sun, providing clues about its internal structure. 

All of the above is well known, but using new tools, astronomers have just discovered a weird mismatch in surface and p-mode signals that emerged more than a decade ago and has become especially pronounced in the current epoch, Cycle 25, which began in 2019.

“Essentially, we can use the p-modes as a proxy and a probe of activity underneath the surface of the Sun, because the frequencies change in response to the changing magnetic field,” said Bill Chaplin, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Birmingham who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. 

“The sunspot number and the radio flux are basically proxies of the total amount of magnetic flux,” he continued. “What we're doing with the p-modes is saying: What is actually happening beneath the visible surface?”  

To answer that question, Chaplin and his colleagues examined four decades of observations from the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON), a collection of six remote solar observatories located around the world that have tracked the Sun’s oscillations since 1976. 

While astronomers have monitored sunspots for centuries, BiSON has enabled researchers to monitor long-term shifts in “helioseismology,” which measures the seismic activity inside the Sun, a dataset that has led to the recent discovery of so-called "glitches" and other previously undetectable solar phenomena. 

“There's a tendency to think that because we've only had data on a few cycles, that all cycles look like that, and that they copy and repeat,” Chaplin said. “I think what's becoming clear is that that isn't the case. No cycle is the same as another.”

The new study revealed that Cycle 25 shows stronger high-frequency p-mode activity just below the surface compared to recent cycles, but that it also appears weaker in terms of surface proxies, meaning it is showing comparatively fewer sunspots and reduced radio flux. This discrepancy hints that magnetic activity has become increasingly confined to a region of several hundred miles under the surface with each successive cycle, though the underlying reason for this change is unclear.

“We saw this really clear signal in the high frequency modes,” said Chaplin. “You can see in the high frequency modes that the current cycle is as strong as Cycles 22 and 23 and that the picture looks very different in the proxies.”

The results suggest that surface proxies, while valuable as rough estimates of magnetic activity, don’t provide the full picture of the roiling dynamics playing out under the solar surface. Chaplin and his colleagues note that several other studies have presented evidence for long-term changes in near-surface solar phenomena, though it will take more research to understand what is driving these trends.

To that end, the team plans to continue observing Cycle 25, which just passed its maximum and is expected to close out with a minimum toward the end of the 2020s. The researchers speculated that the structural changes may be linked either to the longer Hale cycle, which is a period covering two solar cycles—roughly 22 years. Since the Sun’s magnetic poles flip after each solar cycle, the Hale cycle measures the time it takes for the Sun to return to its original magnetic state.

These long-term observations are slowly peeling back the enigmatic inner workings of the Sun, especially the solar dynamo—the process that generates its magnetic field—which remains poorly understood. These efforts could help refine forecasts of hazardous space weather near Earth, while also shedding light on the behavior of other stars.

“Getting more robust space weather predictions is important, but also, from the science point of view, there is [a need] for a better understanding of the dynamo, and how the dynamo changes on long timescales,” Chaplin said.

“Helioseismology is important because it enables you to see inside the Sun, which is something that you can't do by any other means,” he concluded.